Sunday, March 10, 2013

Book Review for BlogAdda: F?@K KNOWS by Shailendra Singh

Well.. first of all, my gratitude goes to BlogAdda for providing me this opportunity to review this peculiarly-named book, F?@k Knows by Shailendra Singh.

Background:

As the back cover of the novel proclaims --

What do you want from life? Are you on the right track? Are you truly happy? If your answer to these questions is ‘F?@k knows!’, then this book is for you. Find the answers to life’s most important questions with the help of uber-successful entrepreneur, Shailendra Singh, co-founder of Percept and inceptor of Sunburn. Told with sparkling, flavourful and in-your-face humour, this book will advise you on how to:

Candid and thoughtful, F?@k Knows will show you how to really live life on your own terms, to do what you want to do and not what you have to do just because your father said so!

Concept:

The book is, primarily, a self-help book written in the first person; part-autobiography and part-philosophy_of_life. As the book begins, it comes out that the author, who is a Bollywood writer/producer and MD of his popular entertainment company, Percept Pictures, used to take his life for granted before writing this book. His whole life he did what his father wanted him to do/be. It's not like that he dislikes his father due to that, rather the latter has been his mentor whole life. But the point being told is - He was led to live his father's life under his own skin. He never got the gist and need of living a life on his own terms.

But everything changes for him when he shockingly suffers a near-fatal cardiac arrest. He has a dream of meeting his father in the heavenly clouds and when he asks him certain questions regarding his life, the answer in reply always is F?@k knows. That's the origin of the title of the book.

Written in a very casual and easy-to-understand style for today's Gen-X and Gen-Y generations, it basically drools over the fact that we have got a single life to live and nothing else. Now how to live! Do we even care about our living from the inner perspectives of heart, body, mind, and spirit. How to be happy? Being happy is not just smiling over once in a while and get dipped in the loads of daily activities without being sad/depressive; if this state is not sad, then it's not being happy also. It's just neutral, like carrying our lives because we are breathing. No! that's not the way.... Be Happy, Follow your Heart and how to do that, this book teaches in quite a strange but understanding manner.

Likes:

I liked few of his ideas about healthy living, happy living. About giving priority to your life first but in an optimistic perspective.

Author's own life story merged with the teachings and other examples in, more or less, every chapter

Compilation of F?@k It list

Chi F?@k Po is a nice tutorial for filtering out negatives and only digest over what heart agrees.

The mentality to be developed of 'Just Done It' instead of 'Just Do It'

The book gets geometrically more interesting after 2/3rd of its reading is done. Life values take a higher place. I, individually, very very much liked the way he has handled the point of F?@*ing v/s love-making. Kudos to him for that!

Liked the way in which author has evolved himself in life after he realized life is very short. He resumed his cricketing, wrote a book, that's pretty much impressive.

Dislikes:

So much overuse of the word F?@k. I understand this word has got several different meanings other than the most usual one, but still I found it very much un-classy to use it in almost every second paragraph, every page.

Initial chapters drag too slow and not-very-interesting while reading

Free usage of direct slangs/cuss words sometimes

His irritating methods of Chi F?@k.

Overall, I won't say this book is for everyone. Only those who are willing to take control of life in their own hands and propel it according to their gut feeling, and reading about that in a f?@king manner, should take it in hand. Or else, you may not like it at all. Author's own lessons of life become your lessons while reading, and this is the gravity of the book, it's most important essence. So, grab a copy and change your life in as-it-is-proclaimed Shailendra Singh's way.